Michelangelo Pistoletto

biography

Biella 1933

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in
1933.
His artistic training began in the studio of
his father, a painter and restorer, where he went to work at the age of
fourteen. He subsequently attended Armando Testa’s advertising design school.
In 1955 he began to exhibit the results of the
inquiry into self-portraiture that characterized his painting in the late
fifties. He received the San Fedele Prize in Milan in 1958. In 1960 he had his
first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. That same year he made several
life-sized self-portraits on gold, silver and copper monochrome backgrounds. In
1961 he created the series of works entitled "The Present", painting his own
image on a black background to which a layer of transparent varnish gave a
mirror gloss. In 1962 he perfected the technique of his Mirror Paintings: he
produced an image on tissue paper by enlarging a photograph to life size,
painting it with the tip of a brush, then affixed it onto a sheet of
mirror-finished stainless steel (after 1971 the painted tissue was replaced by
a silkscreen of the photographic image). These works directly include the viewer
and real time, and open up perspective, reversing the Renaissance perspective
that had been closed by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. The Mirror
Paintings, shown for the first time in March 1963 at Galleria Galatea, quickly
brought Pistoletto international acclaim and led to his inclusion in major
exhibitions of Pop Art and Nouveau Realisme. During the sixties the artist had
solo shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States
(in 1964 at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, in 1966 at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, in 1967 at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in 1969 at the Boijmans
van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam). In 1967 he received the Belgian critics’
prize and that of the São Paulo Biennale. The
Mirror Paintings are the foundation of Pistoletto’s subsequent artistic output
and of the theoretical thought that consistently parallels it.
In 1964, at Galleria Sperone in Turin, he
showed the body of work called Plexiglass—a first transposition in real space
of the new open dimension of the mirror paintings, as well as a declaration of
art’s “conceptual” character. In 1965-1966 he showed a set of works, entitled
Minus Objects, in his studio. These works, made in the contingent dimension of
time and based on the principle of difference, broke with the dogma of the
uniformity of individual artistic style. They are considered fundamental to the
birth of Arte Povera, an art movement theorized by Germano Celant in 1967, of
which Pistoletto was a an animating force and a leading figure. In March, 1967
Pistoletto began to work outside traditional exhibition spaces. In December
of that year he announced the opening of his
studio, in a manifesto. In this context The Zoo arose—a group of people from
different artistic disciplines, together with whom Pistoletto carried out
actions conceived as creative collaborations from 1968 to 1970. Invited to the Venice
Biennale in 1968, he published his Manifesto of Collaboration. Between October
1975 and September 1976 Pistoletto carried out a work that was intended to fill
a full year. Divided into twelve consecutive exhibitions, entitled The Rooms,
the piece
occupied the spaces of Galleria Stein in Turin.
It was the first of a series of complex works, each developed over a year’s
time and named “time continents”. Other works from the series are White Year
(1989) and Happy Turtle (1992). In 1976 he published One Hundred Exhibitions in
the Month of October, a booklet that describes a hundred ideas for works conceived
over a month, many of which he carried out in the following years. In March
1978, in a show at Galleria Persano in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions
his future artwork would take: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art
Takes On Religion. In this same month he began a one-year residency at DAAD in Berlin,
in which city he presented a retrospective exhibition at the Nationalgalerie
and in thirteen public places. Over the
two-year period, 1978-1979, he presented a series of one-person shows, installations
and actions in cities across the United States. This included Creative Collaboration
in Atlanta, a broad creative partnership extended to the entire city, in which he
involved local artists from different disciplines together with artists with
whom he had worked in the past (actor Lionello Gennero, musician Enrico Rava,
composer Morton Feldmann) and members of his family. His artistic collaborations
continued throughout 1979 in different places, particularly at Corniglia
(Liguria), a village with whose inhabitants he staged the play Anno Uno at the
Teatro Qurino in Rome in 1981. In 1981, at Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York,
Pistoletto showed The Nativity, a first example of the rigid polyurethane
sculptures he created in the early eighties. In 1984 he remade some of these
works in marble and on a large scale in his one-person show at Forte di
Belvedere in Florence.
From 1985 to 1989 he created a new cycle of
works, made up of surfaces and volumes in anonymous materials and dark, gloomy
colors, called Art of Squalor, exhibited at Galleria Persano in Turin and at
Galleria Pieroni in Rome.
In 1991 he was appointed Professor of Sculpture
at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy, a position he kept until 2000. With his
students, he developed an innovative program intent on breaking down the
traditional barriers between artistic disciplines.In 1993 he began the phase
called Art Sign, based on an idea conceived in One Hundred Exhibitions in the
Month of October (1976). In addition to producing a series of works
sharing a form that constituted his personal
Art Sign, the artist invited other people, on diverse occasions, to create and
present an Art Sign of their own. In
1994 began Project Art with which Pistoletto — by means of a program manifesto,
public meetings, displays and exhibitions that involved artists of different
disciplines and representatives of broad sectors of society — placed art at the
center of socially responsible
change. 1998 witnessed the establishment of
Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in a former mill in Biella, Italy, acquired
by the artist in 1991. Here the goals expressed in Project Art are still being
developed and accomplished. 2000 saw the inauguration, at the Paoli-Calmettes
Cancer Institute in Marseille, of the
Place of Meditation and Prayer, a
multiconfessional, secular space conceived and executed by the artist.
In 2002 Pistoletto was Artistic Director of the
Turin International Biennial of Young Art entitled Big Social Game. That same
year he received the Diploma di Benemerito della Cultura e dell’Arte from the
President of the Italian Republic. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for
Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. At the same Biennale he presented
Love Difference - Artistic Movement for an InterMediterranean Politic, a
project born in April 2002 at Cittadellarte, for which Pistoletto made a large
reflecting table in the shape of the Mediterranean basin, around which many of
the subsequent activities of Love Difference took place. In 2004 Turin
University graduated him with a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On
that occasion the artist publicly announced the most recent phase of his work,
Third Paradise, the symbol of which is the New Infinity Sign he created in
2003. From 2007, with the collaboration between Pistoletto and the musician
Gianna Nannini, curated by Zerynthia - RAM Radioartemobile, the Third Paradise
evolved into a multimedia work in progress. In 2007, in Jerusalem, Pistoletto
was awarded the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly
inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless
intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding
of the world.” In 2010 Michelangelo Pistoletto wrote the essay "The Third
Paradise", published by Marsilio Editori.
He is the Artistic Director of Evento 2011 –
L'art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux. In 2012 he launches
Rebirth-day, the First Worldwide Day of Rebirth, an initiative which generated
over a hundred events all over the world on 21st December. In 2013, from April
to September, his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto,année un - le
paradis sur terre will take place at the Louvre Museum in Paris, and from May
to July Riflettiamoci at Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in
Milan. In the same year, in Tokyo, he received thePraemium Imperialeaward for painting. His works are present in the collections of
leading museums of modern and contemporary art, including: MOMA, New York;
Guggenheim Museum, New York; Beaubourg, Paris; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte
Moderna, Rome; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Seul; Municipal Museum of Art,
Toyota; Museo Reina Sophia, Madrid; MACBA, Barcellona; Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Washington; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli; Tate Modern,
London. He has participated twelve times in the Venice Biennale (1966, 1968,
1976, 1978, 1984, 1986, 1993, 1995, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2011) and four times in
Documenta, Kassel (1968, 1982, 1992 and 1997).

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